Don't be afraid to ask for help with the most critical first step of your writing journey - the query.
I’ve been blogging since 2011 and have critiqued over 200 queries here on the blog using my Hatchet of Death. This is how I edit myself, it is how I edit others. If you think you want to play with me and my hatchet, shoot me an email.
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My thoughts are in blue, words to delete are in red, suggested rephrasing is in orange.
Kiara Silverthorne is no savior. She’s a thief who steals from heretics in the forest with her brother to keep her starving family alive. This sentence is absolutely packed with nouns. It's not necessarily bad, but it makes me brain do some parsing, and also raises some questions - who are the heretics? Why target them? Honestly it just kind of made me pull back and have to re-read, which isn't a great attribute in the first paragraph As a human born amongst magical valen, she knows it’s only a matter of time before they kill her out of spite, but she’s determined to prove her worth. I honestly don't know what valen are, so that may be more of a fantasy term that an agent or editor would know offhand, but for me it just raised questions. And why would they kill her out of spite? If she was born among magical folk and she steals in order to feed them and keep them alive, why would they kill her? Is proving her worth by keeping them fed not enough? I'm just not totally clear on why they would hate her, or what the motivation is here.
When an attack from Selaeria destroys her home, an ancient sisterhood returns and reveals a dark prophecy, plunging the lands into a war the valen king wants her to stop by killing the Selaerian king. But if she fails, he’ll slaughter her family. Why is she the one that's got to do this? Her skills as a thief don't make her an assassin. And again, the question of her family - are they magical, but not her? Or are they a non-magical family among valen?
Dragged into enemy lands after the raid, while Kiara fights to complete her mission and survive their brutal mines, she learns of the real world where one mustn’t fight for acceptance, but survival. Not really sure what this means, since it felt like she was fighting for survival before. Meanwhile, her brother charms his way into enemy courts and forges an alliance with their king against the valen—and against Kiara herself. As a spy? Or is he really switching sides?
When she escapes the mines, the sisterhood finds her. Inducting her to be their messiah, they entrust her with the key to destroy Selaeria and change the valen eternally. But the Selaerian king’s determined to bring her down. Driven by a prophecy she doesn’t understand and a loyalty to her people that’s becoming a cage, Kiara must decide if she’s the savior the valen need, the monster they’ve made her into, or the sister of a boy who’s turned himself against her. So, overall this starts to read like a synopsis by the time we get to the last paragraph, not a query. You're walking through the plot. The ending line isn't a bad way to set up tension, but I'm truly not understanding the dynamics and motivations here, on just about anyone's side. Right now there's not much here that looks like original fantasy - you've got a chosen one, warring kingdoms, a thwarted assassination - which are all pretty common. Fantasy is absolutely flooded right now, so you'll need to get your query drilled down to what makes this different from any other of the tens of thousands of fantasty books currently available. What are you bringing to the table that is new?
THE FALLEN ANGEL, complete at 105,000 words, is my NA Fantasy with series potential. Perfect for fans of Sara Hashem's THE JASAD HEIR and Shen Tao's THE POET EMPRESS, it’s the origin story of the fae and a feminist retelling of the Greco-Persian Wars. I had literally no clue that this was a feminist retelling of the Greco-Persian wars. That's the most interesting thing in the query - lead with it.
I’m a Canadian author who studied storytelling and scriptwriting for five years. When not ensconced in my blankets dreaming about my characters, I’m working toward a B.S. in aerospace engineering.